Hungry

by Jeff Gordinier

  And easy—easy doesn’t fuel Redzepi’s engines. Here in Tulum, the moment is upon him. Night after night, he and the kitchen team go through the complicated steps of an intricate ballet. But as the choreographer, he remains distant. He’s engaged, but his mind is elsewhere. It is Redzepi’s assistant, Devin McGonigle, who gives me a glimpse of what, after years on the road with the guy, I’ve come to accept as his driving force. I’m standing at the bar and watching the Noma troupe rehearsing in the kitchen. With Redzepi, McGonigle tells me, “there is no now.” There is only the propulsion you see at Saturday Night Projects, at a marketplace in Oaxaca, at the old, original Noma when Redzepi decided that the time had come to abandon it. McGonigle tells me that there is one sentence that she hears over and over when Redzepi is speaking with her. The sentence is “Can we move on now?”

  I believe what we’re cooking here and now at Noma is ultimately something that comes from within; reverberations from long ago, rather than a cerebral construction. Looking back at the last six months, the best moments have happened when something in the present connects with stories from the past. “What is creativity?” I’ve been asking myself while writing this journal. I’m not sure, but tonight I will answer it like this: creativity is the ability to store the special moments, big or small, that occur throughout your life, then being able to see how they connect to the moment you’re in. When past and present merge, something new happens.

  —RENÉ REDZEPI, Journal

  In all of my visits to Copenhagen I had failed to notice it: Copenhagen was a fairy-tale city, an ice-cream cone of a city, the place that gave us Hans Christian Andersen and his stories, the place that had inspired none other than Walt Disney to build a joy factory. My visits to Denmark had always been Noma-centric, concentrated on the culinary nerve center of the metropolis, but on the last of my trips I happened to take along my twelve-year-old son, Toby, and we got on bicycles and I saw the city with new eyes—or older eyes. On the Monday after Easter the sun came out. Toby and I made a beeline for Tivoli Gardens, the amusement park full of roller coasters and bumper cars and peacocks and ruddy-cheeked children in various stages of glee. It was during several visits to Tivoli starting in 1951 that Uncle Walt, then known as a producer of films, nurtured the idea that would evolve into Disneyland.

  Toby and I wavered, at first, when we spied the Star Flyer from afar. It looked like a whirligig that a giant had hoisted in the air after impaling screaming human beings on protruding spikes. Uncovered seats, carrying people who were snapped into orbit with nothing more than a rudimentary steel bar, rose rapidly into the air and then spun around and around like dogs on a leash. We almost balked, but with coaxing from a Tivoli employee who spoke English in tones of gentle chiding, we decided to go for the ride.

  The trip with Toby had a sweet undercurrent. Back home in New York, during the month after our traveling together in Denmark, Toby and his sister, Margot, would greet the arrival of their twin brothers, Jasper and Wesley. Spending a week in Copenhagen, just the two of us, was a way for Toby and me to savor the calm before that peculiar storm. The foundations of my life had collapsed and re-formed in the four years since Redzepi had first met me for coffee in downtown Manhattan. It may be one of the lesser-known insights from Ecclesiastes, but apparently there is a time for blowing everything up and a time for building it all back. Now I hovered a few weeks away from becoming a father of four. Early in January, Lauren and I had signed some papers inside the Spanish-style courthouse in Santa Barbara and had stepped outside to get married by a justice of the peace in the California sunlight that we’d always associate with home. A ukulele duo played “Maybe I’m Amazed” and “Sea of Love.” It was a small wedding. Our guests were our two sets of parents and Lauren’s brother, Danny, who’d managed to fly into Santa Barbara from Los Angeles in a tiny prop plane. Danny had to do that because a lethal mudslide had wiped out entire neighborhoods in Santa Barbara County and had flooded Highway 101 with rocks and mud and debris. There was no direct route to drive from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara; a drive that would usually take a couple of hours now required about six hours of curving east and heading north through the Central Valley before slicing westward toward Santa Maria. Danny preferred to fly. In spite of the small-and-fast nature of our nuptials, Lauren and I had wound up exchanging our vows in front of an audience of one hundred or so schoolchildren. They watched us silently and ate their noontime sandwiches. We were told that they had congregated there, on the lawn behind the courthouse, because the mudslides had shut down their school.

  While I had been home, Redzepi had been averting his own disasters. The risks that he had initiated years earlier, driven by his hunger for change, had come close to wiping out whatever he had built. Noma 2.0 had opened, but barely, and the month when I was getting married in Santa Barbara might’ve qualified as the worst month of the chef’s life. “Owing to the property’s historic significance and Denmark’s strict landmark regulations, construction was bound by rules Redzepi only discovered after they broke ground,” wrote Howie Kahn in a report about the restaurant’s shaky resurrection.

  At one point last summer, construction came to a halt when parts of a 17th-century wall were unearthed. Preservationists were called in to determine its significance. “They told me it could possibly take two years to figure out what it was and how it might affect us,” Redzepi says. “I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t breathe. We would have gone bankrupt.” This doomsday scenario was averted. “They finished their evaluation after five weeks,” Redzepi says. The delay did set the restaurant’s opening back by more than a month, becoming another unforeseen event in a series that at times left Redzepi feeling he should have never initiated the move. “It’s been insane,” he says. “But there are just things you say yes to, even before you know how to totally plan.”

  Toby and I met Redzepi and his family for brunch at Sanchez. If anyone thought that Redzepi’s hunger for Mexican food could be sated by a few months in Tulum, they were mistaken. He craved it more than ever. Rosio Sánchez, now presiding over her own full-service restaurant, knew to keep a long table set aside for the Redzepi family on Sunday mornings: Nadine and René, Arwen and Genta and Ro, Nadine’s mother, Bente Svendsen, and her sister, Berrit. Sunday was a restorative day for Redzepi, the previous week of service having careened to a close with Saturday Night Projects. Salsa and masa provided the needed sustenance. Tostadas topped with smoked salmon, oysters whose cavities had turned tangerine with a mignonette of sea buckthorn and habanero, fresh warm tortillas ready to be rolled around pockets of eggs and carnitas. The restlessness of my last encounter with Redzepi, in Tulum, had been replaced by something else. The buildup toward the grand opening of Noma 2.0 had been tumultuous—Nadine compared it to the gut-churning anxieties of the norovirus crisis in 2013. At night, sleep needed to be coaxed. Redzepi would toss and turn with worry. At the bottom of the struggle, when construction of the new Noma was delayed for two months because of the discovery of those old stones in the dirt, Redzepi had succumbed to sleeping pills in order to force his body into a state of rest. Now he depended on something else. At Sanchez, to show me, he pinched his fingers to his lips, pantomiming a puff on a joint.

  If he kept moving, he didn’t have to think about it. In moments of repose, it came back to him, the way he had spent his fortieth birthday in a hospice in Copenhagen, sitting by his father’s bedside, watching cancer get the final word. His father had died four days later.

  “Forty-five years ago, my father came to Denmark as an Albanian Muslim immigrant,” Redzepi wrote in an Instagram post on December 22, 2017. “Like many others before and after him, he spent much of his life in an adopted country, toiling as a manual laborer, cleaning dishes, hauling fish, driving taxis, cleaning floors. A lifetime of double shifts. My father took comfort in cooking a good meal, and the pleasures of family around a table, eating and sharing. I remember waking up in the morning, the smell of burning
wood, seeing my father tending the fireplace, hearing the crackling sound of chestnuts roasting for breakfast. His tomato salad, sliced wafer thin, with a dash of vinegar and a fistful of sweet parsley leaves. The bean stew. The sauté of spicy sausage and onions…those are only memories now. Everything he did was to bestow his family with happiness and better opportunities. Never once in his life did he complain, not even when the cancer ate him from within. Every success I have found in my life, I can connect to a sacrifice he made.”

  In a city that had inspired Walt Disney to erect a replica of the Matterhorn on a flat expanse of Anaheim, California, Redzepi had fashioned his own version of Tomorrowland, Adventureland, and Fantasyland. He had rebuilt the city in his own image, redrawing the old maps, changing the way Denmark talked about its own cuisine. Gloom would overtake him, especially on those days when the pain of his father’s absence was at its most acute, but he could keep moving and he could keep gathering with his family for tacos. He watched the table at Sanchez and smiled as plates of food were passed around and shared. “I feel like I’m eating sunshine,” Nadine said.

  * * *

  —

  As the new Noma debuted with a seafood-dominated menu, Redzepi posted stories on his Instagram feed that were titled Failures1 and Failures2. These were gastronomic gaffes so odd that they bordered on the comic, and he tapped into their humorous potential in his captions, but the irony is that at Noma it could be hard to tell the difference between the dishes that made the final cut and those that didn’t.

  “Smokey cod face broth. Is the eye too much? (It does have a purpose.)”

  “This is a fish bladder—you can eat it, buuuuut we don’t really know.”

  “That time we tied two octopuses together to make ‘pancetta’….NOOOPE.”

  “Hermit crabs got released back into the ocean.”

  “ ‘Pickled squid’ never really worked.”

  It said something about Noma—and the appetite for risk that was embedded in the international pop-ups and Saturday Night Projects—that Redzepi didn’t hesitate to air his R&D mistakes in public. And it said something about Noma that those mistakes didn’t come across as being worlds away from the delights that customers would be rapturously Instagramming a few days later. To dust off a famous quip from This Is Spinal Tap, it’s a fine line between clever and stupid. It’s a fine line, too, between delicious and disgusting. The constant push forward would yield far more duds than hits. Noma was like a band that had tasked itself with writing a new song every day, just to see what would happen, and there were some fans of the band, like David Chang, who stubbornly insisted that the early songs would never be surpassed.

  One morning during my week in Copenhagen, the Momofuku chef and his wife, Grace Seo, ambled into the Redzepis’ kitchen, where Chang began to wax nostalgic for Noma in its leaner and hungrier years, its us-against-the-world years, when Redzepi himself (in league with core comrades like Matt Orlando and Christian Puglisi and Lars Williams) had dreamed up the first series of Noma classics by marrying a distinct geographical philosophy to force of will.

  The musk ox tartare, Chang mentioned.

  “Oh, I loved that dish,” Nadine Redzepi said.

  The langoustine on a hot rock, Chang said.

  “I loved that dish,” she said again.

  Unlike songs, these dishes could not be heard again. You couldn’t download them or stream them. Maybe someday, if Noma were to announce its closure, Redzepi would resurrect them for a last stroll down memory lane, but it was difficult to imagine it. Redzepi in temperament appeared to mirror the natural world from which he drew inspiration. Nature was nothing if not a symphony of flux. “Rather than taming nature, as farms tend to do, the new Noma would let it in,” Lisa Abend wrote of the new space. Nature would govern it, too. The menu, the team, the purpose of each room would only change and change again.

  The new Noma, when I got to it on foot, did not look remotely finished, and that felt right. Parts of the property were still walled off behind plywood. The original Noma sign, ceremoniously removed letter by letter while a crowd watched at Strandgade 93, didn’t appear to be back up yet. As far as I could tell, there was no sign. There was no grand entrance. There was no way to figure out where the front door was. Welcome to the new Noma, which could easily have passed for a Humboldt County pot farm. “A week before the restaurant was to open, a massive tarp protected the still-exposed space from rain and snow, the lounge windows had yet to be installed, and the dining room ceiling wasn’t complete,” Abend wrote. “The staff had long abandoned the idea of landscaping. Special projects director Annika de Las Heras was just hoping they’d have time to throw some mulch over the thick mud that surrounded the restaurant. Cooks and waiters worked through the night, hauling planks and stuffing acoustic insulation between the ceiling slats. And that was before the kitchen tops failed to appear.”

  Maybe all of the delays and glitches had forced Redzepi to reel in some of the grand sweep of his dreaming. As I approached the perimeter of the new Noma with Toby in tow, I couldn’t help but recall my bumpy ride to the site two years earlier, in a wooden bicycle basket that would normally have carried a couple of kids or the day’s haul of groceries. From the outside now, the view wasn’t that different. Brambly foliage sprouted out of a bunkerish mound. Half-sunken houseboats bobbed on brackish water. In the distance, right across the border of Christiania, you could see one of the residences of that anarchic precinct. It looked like a teepee.

  Apparently the Noma bakery was up and running, and Mette Søberg (now even more of a creative force at the restaurant) could be seen conducting flavor experiments behind the glass of the R&D chamber, but other areas of the compound—was this a greenhouse? was that an ant farm?—were still under construction. For a diner in the spring of 2018, the effect was that of experiencing a work in progress. I suppose Noma always existed as a work in progress, shedding skin and evolving from one larval form to another from year to year, but the mud-tracked, makeshift quality of the setting conveyed the feeling of a Broadway musical that was still working out a few kinks in previews.

  Inside, though, it was a different story. Ali Sonko and Bente Svendsen greeted us with hugs at the entrance, and we were led through the front door. Inside was clockwork. The kitchen looked familiar—it turned out that Redzepi had used the outdoor kitchen at Noma Mexico in Tulum as a model, a beta version, of the kitchen his crew would put into action here in Copenhagen. It was a long, commodious space punctuated by islands, at intervals, where squads attended to specific dishes with practice-it-ten-thousand-times precision.

  “It is the season of the birch water,” a server told me and my lunch guest, who happened to be Pete Wells from the Times. Even our drinking water here at lunch would carry a trace of the forest. Birch trees had been tapped for their woodsy elixir. What followed that sip was a feast both refined and barbaric, with juicy brains sucked out of shrimp heads and clam butter scooped into your mouth with the rim of a Venus clam shell, blue mussels arranged like wings and plumply nestled in pools of kelp butter. There were mahogany clams from the Faroe Islands and scallops that Roddie Sloan had hoisted from the sea bottom in Norway, their cool flesh served with a bright orange melting cube of scallop roe in the shell. Sea snails and roses, cloudberries and pinecones—the arc of the meal amounted to a strange chamber music of popping and melting, explosions of sweetness and brine, the contours of oceanic flavors. Sea snail and sea urchin and sea cucumber—once again Redzepi was like Glenn Gould doing the Goldberg Variations, reimagining the intricate counterpoint of Bach, or in this case the ocean, with a hundred different shifts in tempo and tone, stressing this note over that, cooling, heating, isolating, overlapping, juxtaposing, seeing what the vastness of the ocean might be capable of when placed into human hands.

  When I had the sea urchin dish, in which rows of glistening pumpkin seeds stood at attention nestled closely
together like a cartoon church choir or a nest full of hungry baby birds, I couldn’t help but eat it and rewind to the journey I had been on for four years. Here was uni as cloud light as a soufflé, its tangy froth married to the nutty chew of the seeds. The Noma menu was constantly new, chronically in transition, but here I detected a link to the past. There was an echo, in this dish, of the dish at the original Noma that had first sent me drifting away. Maybe it was because of that dish that I had gone off on this spree, boarding spur-of-the-moment flights and emptying my pockets as some kind of self-medication. To eat a bite so perfect that it calls you to sell your house and join the circus—absurdly but undeniably, that was the impact that that sea urchin had had on me. This new dish of uni got me looking back at the miles I’d traversed and the calories I’d consumed.

  Keep moving. It’s the only way. That was the “lesson,” if there was one. I may’ve been caught in a momentary loop of Proustian flashback reels because of that uni, but Redzepi himself was already moving forward again, just as he had been in Mexico and Australia. “Look at these ducks,” he told me as we wandered out around the lake after lunch had ended. “I can’t wait to come out here and shoot some for the fall menu.”

  He was kidding, I think, even though it’s true that Noma’s fall menu would focus on the funky delights of wild game. He wasn’t kidding about the bear. “Last year we were offered five bears,” he said. “From Sweden. We might take one of them. Young bears are tasty bears.” Right now all of the fish tanks in one of the Noma compound’s eleven chambers held live crustaceans and shellfish, each tank carefully calibrated to stay at the temperature and salinity level most appealing to each particular sea creature. But come autumn, after the close of the summer vegetable menu, it would become a game room. There would be birds and beasts hanging and aging in the wild air. The flesh would age and be transformed. The air would turn it into something else.